Its quiet. Nearly silent when it enclosed in a case. I have a rag underneath it though, otherwise there's a lot of vibration. When its out of the case, or if you put your ear next to the case with it in it you can hear a little bit of "ticking" or "chattering" from it. All in all, its really quiet in my opinion.

Zipties work fine, usually anyways. I jerked my TDX around a lot while setting up my system and it caused a tiny leak. I took off the cheap zipties and used two industrial ones that have the metal arm in the lockbox and they tighten down very tight, which fixed the problem!

I still have the other ones on my res and my maze4 which work fine. My res did leak once but it was because I was pulling on it like crazy trying to move it up to the next 5.25 bay.

yea I just put the two metal clamps on the pump because the water that comes right out of the pump has a lot of pressure. I have two more so I'm planning on putting them on my maze 4 CPU block. Other than that I just have zipties.